Before 1500 no family covered more of the earth's surface than Austronesian. It reaches from Madagascar off the coast of Africa to Easter Island in the eastern Pacific, and from Taiwan to New Zealand, which is more than half the circumference of the planet. The standard account places its origin in Taiwan, because the deepest divisions in the family are all among the indigenous Formosan languages and everything outside the island, some twelve hundred languages, descends from one branch of them.
From Taiwan the expansion moved into the Philippines, then Indonesia and the western Pacific, and finally out into the open ocean. The last stages were extraordinary feats of navigation: Hawaii, Easter Island and New Zealand were reached by deliberate voyaging against prevailing winds, in double-hulled canoes, by people navigating with stars, swells and birds.
Madagascar was settled from Borneo, across the Indian Ocean, which is why the language of a large African island is most closely related to a language of Southeast Asia. The family is a standing demonstration that language, archaeology and genetics can be made to tell one story, and that the story can be surprising. It also holds two of the most widely spoken languages of Southeast Asia, Malay in its Indonesian and Malaysian standards and Javanese, so the family is at once the vehicle of some of the smallest speech communities on earth and of a national language used by hundreds of millions.